Archive for the 'Sound City Players' Tag Under 'Soundcheck' Category

He isn’t a fan of idle hands. As leader of two metal bands, Stone Sour and the harder-hitting, mask-wearing Slipknot, Corey Taylor may at times seem manic on stage, but in his day-to-day life he’s extremely organized, keeping his planner full of various projects spanning as far as five years into the future. Already there’s no more available space on his 2013 calendar.

Taylor is currently finishing the final chapters of the follow-up to Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good, his autobiography from last year. He’s been prepping for the April 9 release of Stone Sour’s fourth album, House of Gold & Bones – Part 2, as well as the debut of an accompanying Dark Horse Comics miniseries of graphic novels, the first of which arrives April 17.

The quartet also will perform at the fifth annual Revolver Golden Gods Awards, for which it is nominated in the best vocalist, best drummer and album of the year categories. That takes place May 2 at Club Nokia, the same L.A. Live venue Stone Sour headlines on Wednesday.

“I do a lot of multitasking, let’s just put it that way,” says Taylor, second from left, taking a break after sound-check for a show in Milwaukee last week.

“I try to take advantage of the time I have. I know a lot of guys who just sit backstage and sweat, and there’s very little else that they do. I love having a deadline. I love the fact that I can think of something one day and within the next day or week I’m working on that. I just throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.”

The concept for the two-part album, the first half of which dropped in October, came from an idea Taylor had while wrapping up the group’s 2010 effort, Audio Secrecy. He began to pen a short story about a man who awoke in a strange world and was confronted by seemingly nonsensical questions, but the project was quickly shelved.

Then came crushing news: Longtime friend and Slipknot bassist Paul Gray had died of an apparent drug overdose. A year later, as Stone Sour was prepping to tour, drummer Roy Mayorga suffered a minor stroke and the band scrapped its entire outing.

“Life took over at that point,” Taylor says with a heavy sigh. “Everything creatively went onto the back burner.”

With Stone Sour at rest while Mayorga recovered, Taylor once again slipped behind the mask and embarked on a long-awaited tour with Slipknot. During that trekm his short-story idea came screaming back to life, and soon he started writing songs to coincide with the narrative.

He demoed the songs, putting together “this vast presentation to show (the band) the scope of where we could go with it. I had this idea for so long and it just came back at the right time, because I had a lot on my mind and there was a lot I had to say.”

But the tenacious 39-year-old didn’t hurry the process. Instead, to promote his biography, he set off on a solo tour, offering acoustic versions of Slipknot and Stone Sour songs and indulging a bit of stand-up at intimate gatherings, before regrouping with his main band last summer to headline the 27-date Mayhem Festival.

Upon returning home, and with the album nearly finished, Taylor says he opened his big mouth and let a few writer friends in on the concept, remarking: “Actually, this would make a pretty cool comic book.”

He grew up a fan of graphic novels and often dug through his mother’s stash of beat-up comics as a kid, captivated by Marvel characters, specifically Spider-Man and Captain America. In the '90s he discovered Frank Miller (of Sin City fame) and fell in love with Garth Ennis’ Preacher series, then began to discover other authors: Warren Ellis, Brian Michael Bendis, Brian Azzarello.

“I follow writers more than I follow characters anymore,” he says. “I knew that when I started this thing that maybe I could write a comic book. I had written my own book and I’d been writing a column for years in an English magazine called Rock Sound. I knew I had the chops to do that, so I figured this was maybe just one more thing I could try my hand at. If I fail, then I fail.”

As if that weren’t enough, last month Taylor also took part in a surprise ensemble dubbed the Sound City Players, which performed at both the Sundance and Hollywood premieres of Dave Grohl’s documentary Sound City. The Foo Fighters chief pulled together an all-star lineup for the occasions, including John Fogerty, Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and guitarist Rick Nielsen, with whom Taylor performed several Cheap Trick classics and cut a song for the soundtrack, Real to Reel.

“Honestly, I was just trying to keep up,” Taylor says of rehearsals with the group. “I was playing with people who I grew up listening to and who really formed not only the way I make music but how I write music and lyrics. On one side of it, it’s very humbling and it fulfils something in me that I really love. And on the other side, it took everything I had not to stop in the middle of a song and go: ‘Oh my God! Look at you people! Are you kidding me!?’

“It’s crazy that to some extent people look at me on that level, because I’m the guy who never really stops to realize where I’m at in life.”

When Grohl approached Taylor about participating in his elegy for the legendary Van Nuys studio, which closed in 2011, the singer says he was filled with emotion. Slipknot recorded its Grammy-nominated second album Iowa at Sound City in 2001 and Taylor recalls being blown away simply standing in the same space where Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Rage Against the Machine, Johnny Cash and more had captured some of their finest work.

He credits Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme with hitting the nail on the head about the place’s demise: “Like many things, there’s no bookstore, there’s no music store and there’s no Sound City.”

“He summed that up so perfectly. It’s one of those things that you grow up with and it’s a huge part of your life, and just from a fan perspective – a music nut or a book nut – it breaks your heart that these things are gone,” he says. “There will never be anything like that again, and it’s bittersweet. All you can do is dedicate yourself to the spirit of what those things are.”

Sound City’s downfall is attributable to rapid advances in recording technology, yet though Taylor agrees the process is more streamlined now, he says it also shouldn’t ever mask an artist.

“There used to be a time when you had to have talent to do this. There was no Auto-Tune or Beat Detective, there was no Pro Tools to come in and make things sound perfect. You know what? It doesn’t always have to sound perfect. If you listen to some of the best songs in the world recorded before Pro Tools, you will hear speed fluctuations, you will hear flat notes, you will hear all kinds of flaws in the skin. But that’s why the song sounds the way it does.

“I love the fact that Dave went out on a limb making this. Hopefully it inspires people to learn their craft again and realize they don’t need a computer to make music. Just plug in and play. (It should teach) the next generation of people not to use technology to overcompensate for lack of talent.”

Little more than a month ago we finally got a glimpse of Dave Grohl's Sound City, his documentary about the renowned Van Nuys studio that enabled the recording of scores of rock classics. And as the year began we heard about the formation of the Sound City Players, a supergroup of stars who appear in the film (opening in limited release on Feb. 1) and on its Real to Reel soundtrack (which doesn't drop until March 12).

The star-studded lineup instantly sold out a show slated for Jan. 18 at the Sundance Film Festival – and now they've added a one-off appearance at the Hollywood Palladium on Jan. 31, the same night Sound City debuts at the Cinerama Dome just a few blocks down Sunset Boulevard.

Who will perform alongside the Foo Fighters frontman? A cavalcade of names, all of whom cut sides at the studio back in the day, including Stevie Nicks, John Fogerty, Rick Springfield, Fear leader Lee Ving, Rage Against the Machine drummer Brad Wilk, Cheap Trick guitarist and songwriter Rick Nielsen, Robert Levon Been and Peter Hayes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Alain Johannes, Chris Goss and more.

Also expect to see Grohl's current and past band mates in the mix: Taylor Hawkins, Krist Novoselic, Chris Shiflett, Nate Mendel and Pat Smear. And it wouldn't shock if Paul McCartney turned up, either here or at Sundance, seeing as he contributed to the soundtrack tune "Cut Me Some Slack." The Palladium set is likely to feature other songs from that collection as well as classics from many of the stars involved.